| My fellow Americans. There is a disease spreading through this great country of ours. I feel that if it is not stopped, it will eventually erode the foundations of equality that our nation, the United States of America, is built upon. |
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This disease is quietly infiltrating our society with the guise of social acceptance, but with an insidious payload of segregation and bigotry. I am calling this disease “The Hyphenation of America”. I have disliked it for quite some time now. But I only recently noticed how it has begun to spread and gain acceptance. I was reading a short biography of someone on wikipedia when the information described the subject’s father as a “Jewish-American”. It caught my attention because I wasn’t aware that there was a country called “Jew”. So I was like wtf?? So now people are just hyphenating America with whatever they like. And what is the motivation? Why is it important that I take special notice of a person’s religion? How does it somehow enhance the context of an actor’s biography to know that one of their parents was Jewish? I then had to analyze the whole concept of being a Hyphenated American. Apparently, certain people are not happy just being treated like any other human being. I am finding it strange that so many people who profess to be striving for equality are the ones vehemently using the hyphen to separate themselves from everyone else. Why? Does the hyphen give them some sort of super powers? Isn’t it more desirable to be recognized by your achievements, by who YOU are, than by some arbitrary facet of your predecessors? Can’t I just be an American? Am I somehow doing some disrespect to my heritage if I don’t start describing myself as an Italian-American? Do I need to be more specific and notify my peers that I am a Sicilian- American?? How is it relevant that someone know that their Doctor’s ancestors were from Africa or that their Senator’s parents were from Mexico? Regardless of whether you believe in some form of Creationism or Evolution, there is a “First Human” that all other humans more or less descended from and that human lived in some location probably in Africa or China or the Middle East. Unless you need a language interpreter, there is no reason the general population needs to know your latest country of origin. Now that people are using the hyphen to classify themselves by their religious persuasion, it becomes more apparent that the hyphenator’s motivation is anything but about being American. I now realize that it is not an innocent hyphen at all. No, it actually a minus sign. “I’m a [SOMETHING] minus American”. So apparently these individuals are so much better than ordinary people who happen to live in America, that they have to separate themselves from it using a minus sign. If an individual feels so spiritually, ethnically or morally superior to America, maybe they should separate themselves from it with something a little longer than a hyphen. |